Nigeria is the largest producer of plantain in West Africa, with an annual production of about 2.4 million metric tons, according to a recent report from the Forum For Agricultural Research in Africa ( FARA). Analysis. By Oluwasoyo Folarin Nigeria is the largest producer of plantain in West Africa, with an annual production of about 2.4 million metric tons, according to a recent report from the Forum For Agricultural Research in Africa ( FARA), the technical arm of the African Union Commission (AUC) on matters concerning agricultural science, technology and innovation. Plantain is healthy Plantain consumption helps to address food security and plantain flour is also seen as healthy with nutritious values, according to the study. Plantain has diverse use in medicine, industries and households. These uses has made it demand upsurge in the last decade and positioned the food crop as a viable product for export. One of the major derivative of plantain is plantain flour which is used in the production of baking pastries, waffles, pancakes, breads, soups & more. The constraints There are numerous opportunities to be harness by investors along the crop value chain. The plantain industry should be developed with favorable policies and strong support from the Nigeria government to ease difficulty of business, and integrating strategic investment in plantain, specified the researchers. There are three major constraints with plantain production. Farmers have to deal with the changing climate( off-season, on- season), the menace of pest and disease linked to climate change and the access to finance to determine the price of their plantains. The value chain of Plantain Adeolu Babatunde Ayanwale, Fatunbi Oluwole Abiodun and Ojo Mathew Pau, three researchers from FARA analyzed the various activities of the key actors in the plantain value chain across the southwest region, one of the major centers of plantain production in Nigeria. The study shows that about 49% of farming households are producing plantain as their main crop. 82% of the farmers belong to farmers association, while about 64% also belong to cooperative societies. 90% of the farmers needs 180,000 Naira ( 432 euros) to fill the financing gap. However, membership of cooperative society can have access easily to credit, noted the researchers. The analysis collected data from 300 producers from six states: Lagos, Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti and Ondo. The study has selecting 15 marketers, processors and consumers per state to give a total of 45 respondents for marketers, processors and consumers respectively. According to the researchers, plantain production is mainly dominated by males, monogamously married with an average age of 49 years old and a primary school education. Plantain production is becoming...

Nigeria- Waste management – The youth should seize the job opportunities By Oluwasayo Folarin Nigeria with a growing population of 189 million people produces an estimated 65 million tonnes of waste yearly, Waste Management Society of Nigeria has revealed. According to the World Bank, with a rapid population growth and urbanisation, municipal waste generation is expected to rise to 2.2 billion tonnes by 2025. In Lagos, there are over 10,000 metrics tons of waste generated daily with heaps of waste clogging waterways which are causing environmental hazards. But there are enormous opportunities in sustainable waste management in this country although the jobs in Waste Management have not been seized by the youth. How it can happen? First, corporate environmental strategies should be explained. The youth in Nigeria should know why and how corporations engage in environmental strategies. They have to understand what kind of environmental strategies have been prepared by the country and other countries in Africa and in the world. Recycling, promoting an ecofriendly environment with positive outcome as a massive income should be explained to the youth in rural and urban areas. In riverine areas in Nigeria, plastic bottles can be used to build canoes and these boats will be sold to fishermen. But again, this action has to be explained. Is it safe or not? Is it environmental friendly? In India, plastic bottles are taken off there dumpsites and have been used for building roads. More than 33,796km of roads have been built in India with post-consumer plastic waste according to the last World Economic Forum. There is no time to waste. Niger, Kano and Nasarawa in central and northern Nigeria have been recently affected by flooding due to climate change and human activities such as clogging of drainage and improper disposal of waste. The social enterprise Wecylers based in Lagos can be a model for Nigerian ‘s youth. This company owned by a young woman from Nigerian’s Diaspora can help the youth to overcome difficulties and find opportunities in waste management. Oluwasayo Folarin is a young graduated from the University of Ibadan, the first university of Nigeria. He has a keen interest in Science and Sustainable Development Goals specially the Climate Action Goal in Nigeria. He is currently working as a Research/Teaching Assistant at Osun State College of Technology, Esa Oke, Osun State, in Nigeria where he is assisting lecturers on various research projects. He is now also part of Era Environnement to become a journalist. He will cover stories on climate action. ...

Tabi Joda-Column: ” It is time to reverse the trends!” In Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon alone, 50 metric tons of plastic fragments food packages, straws and table water bottles and empty sachet water bags are drained into the Atlantic Ocean every day. But it is time to reverse the trends. It is everyone’s responsibility not only governments to protect the planet. Over the last ten years the amount of plastic bags produced and used worldwide surpass the amount produced and used during the whole of the 20th century. Regrettably, 50% of the plastic we use, we just use them once and throw away. If we can place in a heap the amount of plastic bags we throw away into the environment each year, it will stretch from earth to the moon and back twenty five times. Globally, more than one million plastic bags are used every minute and an average individual throws away approximately 185 kg of plastic waste per year. An average household dumps about 900kg of plastic waste in a year. Similarly, an approximate 500 billion plastic bags are used and 135 billion plastic water bottles are thrown away every year. Plastic waste accounts for around 10 percent of the total waste generated in households worldwide. The disaster Risk! Every piece of plastic in the ocean breaks down into segments such that pieces from a single liter of plastic bottle could end up on every beach throughout the world. Similarly, almost every farmland is partially covered by plastic. Apart from the harmful effects of plastic bags on animals, plants and aquatic life, the toxic chemical from plastic waste are harmful to the human body when absorbed. A study has shown that apart from Americans who have up to 93% of people tested positive for BPA (a plastic chemical), level of effect are even higher in other parts of the world especially Africa where recycling and waste management policies and orientations are low or even absent in most places. Other studies have shown that some of these compounds found in plastic have been known to alter human hormones or have other potential risk on human health. Alongside the hazardous risks on human health, over one million sea birds and over 100,000 marine mammals are reportedly killed annually from toxins originating from plastic waste in our oceans. 44% of seabird species, 22% of cetaceans, 32% of sea turtle species and a growing list of fish species, crabs and prawns are killed by plastics or have their habitat altered by plastic in or around their bodies. Plastics also degrade soil quality leading to low crop productivity and consequently poverty,...

Feed the world sustainably: challenging Welcome words by Nnimmo Bassey, Director of Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) at Media Training-Promoting Biosafety in Nigeria held in Benin City , Nigeria, on Friday, 24th March 2017 Promoting genetically modified organisms: dangerous The need to interrogate our biosafety has become very pertinent because of the many myths around modern agricultural biotechnology. These myths are being peddled regularly by the industry promoting genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and their team players in public offices. A major plank on which biosafety, and perhaps biosecurity, rests is the precautionary principle[1]. This principle, or approach, is a safeguard against the permission or introduction of products or elements into the environment where there is no scientific consensus that such an introduction would be safe or would not have an adverse impact. In other words, the precautionary principle helps to disallow the use of citizens as guinea pigs in experimental release of products that could harm them. The argument that there is a risk in everything is hollow and an acceptance of that as an excuse to expose citizens to harm is inhuman. Information of biosafety: a moral duty In this engagement on biosafety we hope to share information on the issues of biosafety and GMOs in Nigeria and Africa. The aim is that media practitioners would be able to sift the facts from the myths, and by so doing help the public to require a sense of responsibility from our biosafety regulators, research institutions, political forces and commercial interests behind the risky genetic engineering approach to food production.The key myths by which citizens are sold the idea of GMOs as being desirable include that they provide the most assured way of feeding the burgeoning population of hungry mouths in the world. The planks on which this highly seductive myth has been erected are quite flimsy. Why GMO is saleable ? Research has shown that GMOs do not necessarily yield higher than normal crops, making the talk of producing more food by using GMOs simply fatuous. Secondly, over one third of food currently produced in the world today simply gets wasted,[2] while most of the GMOs currently grown in the world end up as animal feed.[3]Another argument used to sell GMOs is that they require the use of less chemical in terms of pesticides and herbicides because the crops can be engineered to withstand herbicides or to act as pesticides themselves. A possible source for cancer The emergence of what have been termed super weeds and superbugs have dented that claim as farmers have had to sometimes apply stronger doses of herbicides and pesticides on farms where such...

Crowding the private sector into Africa’s climate action It is in the enlightened self-interest of African private sector to begin to mobilise investment capital for Africa’s climate action LAGOS, Nigeria, December 12, 2016/ — The global community for climate action was spooked by the November 8 election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States. The US President-elect had earned the sobriquet of “climate denier,” for his claim that climate change is a hoax. However, there is cautious optimism that his presidency will not overturn the global agenda on climate change. Hopefully, his views on climate change will change and align with reality when he settles into the Oval Office. Policymakers also believe that global climate agreements cannot be reversed easily. In the meantime, stakeholders are pressing on with formulating strategies for climate change mitigation and adaptation. The 22nd session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 22) to the United Nations’ agency on climate change held on November 7 – 18 in Marrakech, Morocco. At the climate talks, Australia, Japan, United Kingdom, Pakistan and seven other countries ratified the December 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. A total of 111 countries, including the United States, China and Member Countries of the European Union ratified the agreement by the time COP 22 concluded. Since the Paris accord entered into force on November 4th, quite earlier than anticipated, global action against climate change has effectively shifted to strategic programming. Therefore, in Marrakech, Canada, Germany, Mexico and the United States published their plans to significantly decarbonize their economies by 2050. A group of 47 developing nations also committed to running entirely on renewable energy sources “as rapidly as possible.” Some of the plans are already gaining traction. Investments in renewable energy totalled $286 billion in 2015. This surpassed by 3% the previous high of renewable energy investment achieved in 2011. Data gleaned from Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2016, a joint publication by United Nations Environment Programme and Bloomberg, further revealed that last year, coal and gas-fired electricity generation drew less than half the record investment made in solar, wind and other renewable energy sources. The trend in renewable energy investment is a mixed bag, even in developing countries. China alone accounted for 55% of total investment last year; Africa’s share was less than 5%. As climate change mitigation is being driven by investment in green energy, Africa is already taking the familiar position at the back seat on the ‘green energy train’. This was not unanticipated by climate policymakers. Although China is the clear leader in investment in renewables, other developing countries, in particular the low-income countries, are...

COP 22: Why Marrakesh Is More Important Than Paris COP21? COP 22 will be held in Marrakesh, Morocco, from 7 to 18 November 2016. COP 20 in Lima was tagged the COP of negotiations of a universal climate change agreement, COP 21 in Paris last year was a COP of Agreement while COP 22 in Morocco is tagged the COP of Implementation. Taking critical decisions to ensure the implementation of the Paris Agreement is the major endeavor at COP 22 in Morocco. Last year, African Development Bank support contributed significantly to ensuring that Africa’s concerns were addressed in the Paris Agreement. The Bank has also committed to triple its climate change finance to about USD 5 billion per year and to provide USD 12 billion on renewable energy investments by 2020. In consistence with the New Deal on Energy for Africa that provides a good entry point for the implementation of the Paris Agreement, and given that COP 22 is a key milestone for the implementation of that Agreement, it is important that Africa is fully on board, while ensuring linkages with the Bank’s High Fives. “To make the Paris Agreement a real-world success story we need more than a historic political agreement, we need practical climate action to “decouple GDP from GHG” – or economic growth from greenhouse gases – as UN climate chief Christiana Figureres put it during a lecture at Climate-KIC partner the Grantham Institute.” Fours ways Marrakesh is going to help achieve that: Going from National to Global Action Plans is very important: In the run up to Paris, countries submitted their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Now, they are preparing their first climate action plans (NDCs) – dropping the ‘Intended’ from the title – which will be updated every five years and should represent an increase in ambition. This is the often cited ‘ratcheting’ mechanism built into the Paris Agreement. In Marrakesh, countries will hope to agree on how the stock-taking exercise should work every five years, and how they can make sure it will indeed ratchet up the level of ambition around the world. The action plans outline the post-2020 climate actions of each country and contain details such as emission-reduction targets and how governments plan to make those happen. A range of policies, including those addressing the aviation and maritime sectors (which are missing from the Paris Agreement), need to be drawn up and implemented to create what is often called the “enabling environment” for the transition to a low-carbon economy. Making Measuring Progress Transparent will keep the commitment: Perhaps even more important, are...